Americans will never understand Marmite
‘I fucking hate Marmite,’ said Andy McLeod, a young ad man who at some point in the mid-1990s was tasked with remarketing the savoury spread that had been around since 1902. ‘Oh, I love it,’ said his creative partner. They both then just looked at each other. You either love it or you hate it, Marmite – at least since 1996. At first, the yeast extract, made with the vitamin-rich by-products of beer-brewing at a factory in Burton on Trent, had been promoted as healthy, ‘the growing-up spread you never grow out of’. By the 1980s, it was ‘My mate, Marmite’, shouted by an army platoon, playing on its history as a supplement for British-based POWs during the second world war.
